Letter from Death Row

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It is not unusual for reporters to get mail from jail or prison inmates — I receive a letter every few months or so — or even telephone calls. Many assert their innocence or complain they were punished too harshly. Some make rational arguments, while others appear to be lost in delusions — like the inmate who passed along proof that he wasn’t the one who had slain his victim a few years ago. It was the Zodiac killer.

It was a change of pace, then, to receive a letter recently from San Quentin Death Row prisoner Daniel C. Frederickson, who admits he is quite guilty of killing a Santa Ana hardware store manager during an attempted robbery in 1996. (This appears to be at odds with a letter he once sent to a Canadian anti-death penalty group professing his innocence.)

Frederickson, a career criminal, was sentenced to death in 1998 after he insisted on representing himself at trial. He was 34 at the time. He waffled with jurors, asking them to spare him, then pleading to die, then arguing that he killed because he was afflicted with “explosive personality disorder,” according to reports in the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times.

His current complaint has to do with Nathaniel Burris, the Bay Area man accused of killing two people in August at the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge toll plaza, including his toll-taking ex-girlfriend. Frederickson says Burris should have been allowed to plead guilty right away and accept a swift death, as Burris tried to do unsuccessfully (see our story here).

“Why do you assume he nor I nor any other repentant murderer is not merely accepting and acknowledging our culpability and seeking to dispense with the wasting of time and money of the people of the state with the lie that we are innocent?” he asks in his letter, dated Sept. 13. “Why can’t a guilty man ‘man up’ and accept responsibility? Why must we waste millions of dollars?”

I tried to answer that question in an article on the Burris case that went over some of the safeguards built into the trial court system and quoted, among others, San Diego criminal attorney Bob Grimes. He said, “It really isn’t up to him. I suppose if someone is resourceful enough, they will find a way to hang themselves in their cell. But they’re not going to commit suicide with the assistance of our legal system.”

Elisabeth Semel, who directs the death penalty clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law, added, “In my experience, individuals who want to represent themselves are often lacking the legal skill to do so and have profound emotional problems.”

Burris has since accepted help from the Contra Costa County public defender and has pleaded not guilty.

As for Frederickson, he seems to balk at his loss of control. But it was he who took control, and everything else, away from his victim — Scott Wilson, 30, of Costa Mesa.